Maybe I'm just getting older, but I have no great quarrel with Rolling Stone's Top 500 list.. Any such list is bound to failure unless you wrote it yourself. If anything, I wish it had been more irritating, more upsetting -- the titles we see in the Top 50 are the same ones. more or less, w've seen for years. It's like the Sight and Sound poll of great films: Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Rules of the Game are there, and you couldn't move them with a blowtorch.

Some notes:

*I admit with some shame I've never heard Pet Sounds and that I don't own Rubber Soul.

*I read the little article about Highway 61 Revisited. Not sure I've ever heard that Edie Sedgwick was the inspiration for "Like a Rolling Stone," and I don't recall the Stein-Plimpton bio, Edie, making a case for it. It makes sense lyrically, but that song came out in 1965, when Edie was still riding high in the Warhol world. She hadn't reached the point of having to get used to living on the street, so to speak -- with her dough, of course, she never did, really, just one rehab center after the next.

* I'm fully aware of the influence of What's Going On, but I've never really dug the record that much.

* I completely wore out my last copy of Exile on Main Street, but I still would put Beggars Banquet over it anyday.

*Is Blood on the Tracks Dylan's greatest 1970s album? I prefer Desire.

*Out of place in the Top 50: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Hotel California.